Last Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin used his state-of-the-nation speech to showcase six superweapons that would supposedly revolutionize the game of geopolitics for Russia, and give his country a significant military advantage over the United States. In particular, Putin revealed that Russia possesses hypersonic technologies that can render NATO’s U.S.-led missile defense system completely “useless.”

From a national security perspective, Putin’s claims of hypersonic weapons should not be underestimated but should be analyzed in an attempt to parse fact from fiction.

The team of analysts at The Drive precisely did that, and made several conclusions: In particular, one of the weapons Putin mentioned in his speech was an air-launched hypersonic anti-ship missile launched from a Mikoyan MiG-31 Foxhound. Upon closer examination, the Drive team found the hypersonic weapon closely resembles the Iskander short-range ballistic missile.

Webmaster's Commentary:

This is all based on the assumption that the computer animated video of the new weapons is accurate, and having worked on similar military animations while at Abel's, I can tell you that changes are made to the models to conceal important details.

Remember when the existence of the F-117 stealth fighter was first revealed? Aurora came out with a plastic model kit of the jet, and everyone thought that was what the plane looked like. In Tom Clancy's "Red Storm Rising", his description of the stealth jets initiating the first attack on Russia match the Aurora model. Then the real plane was revealed and of course was totally different. I can imagine a lot of foreign governments wasted a huge amount of time trying to reverse-engineer the stealth from that first Aurora model kit!